Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life, 1876-1915 – Volume Four: A Portrait of Americans' Daily Lives

Everyday Life in America

by Thomas J. Schlereth

A valuable and compelling portrait of the daily life of Americans during the Victorian era; the fourth volume in the Everyday Life in America series.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Research, 19th Century, Reference, Victorian

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

Reviews

[Quirkyreader · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this book. Read it now. This tome is history at its finest. It also explains why many things are now the way they are. Those who enjoy studying the 19th century will get sucked in. I had a hard time putting this book down. So read this book now.

[Rachel Swindler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this for my history class and found it really interesting as a in-depth overview of Victorian America, how they worked, played, lived and died. This book showed me that, while many things like technology have changed, the concerns and debates of Victorian America is very similar to the present day. We're still debating immigration. We're still debating how great a role government should play in individual lives. Even though that wasn't the intent of this book, it is what I walked away with and this book was interesting and in-depth enough for me to see this.
I would recommend this for anyone who has an deeper interest in U.S. history and society, but this isn't a pick-up-for-fun book. It would probably only appeal as a non-school book to those who are interested in that sort of thing already.

[Lauren Albert · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful, fun look at what life was like in Victorian America. What doesn't sound like fun (housing, work, etc.) becomes much more interesting than expected in Schlereth's hands.

[Michael Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve been fascinated by history since adolescence, and I ended up with a couple of degrees in it, but my preference has always been for social history and material history. Not kings and treaties and the broad sweep of anonymous events but intimate, everyday, “people next door” history. And that also laps over into the areas of local history and genealogy, and also archival management, in all of which I spent most of my career.

This is the fourth volume in the “Everyday Life in America” series, covering the period between the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, when America’s population, geographical size, and gross national product all doubled in an average person’s lifetime. The country went from fundamentally agrarian to mostly urban and transportation and communications were revolutionized, which meant equally revolutionary changes in the American character.

It’s a work of synthesis, not original research, and Schlereth includes an enormous amount of detail in describing what America was like. He breaks it all down into thematic sections covering immigration, internal migration, and mobility generally; working and labor; housing and consumerism; communications; entertainment and leisure; birth and death; and what he calls “striving,” by which he means education at all levels, but also reform and progressive Christianity. There are lots of statistics (another thing Americans have always loved) and examples and anecdotes to illuminate the points he wants to make, and the reader is likely to undergo numerous small epiphanies regarding the world at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. There’s a lengthy bibliography to aid in the pursuit of subjects of particular interest.

[Pete · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the fourth volume of six in the “Everyday Life in America” series which I now own. Each book has a distinct author and I’m taking them in order.
This one includes what is commonly known as “The Gilded Age” of the 1890’s because of the prosperity the U.S. enjoyed as a result of science and industrialization.

Because my parents were born in 1898 and became adolescents by the end of this period, many of the cultural values and traditions of the time were naturally absorbed by them and were part of my own early family life. The country was still highly regionalized and divided by race and religion, but also subject to rapid changes due to improving transportation and communication.

As I read this book I began to appreciate a lot more how much change in lifestyle my parents experienced during their lifetimes and how many of the things in mine that I assumed were longstanding were in reality very new.

Although penned by different historians, these books all share a comprehensive personalized coverage of everyday life that brings a fresh, and nonpolitical vision of our country.

[Susan Raines · Rating 4 out of 5]

Comprehensive, but filled with interesting details and bits of humor. A good overview of the era.

[Christy B · Rating 3 out of 5]

To someone wanting a general overview of American life in the Victorian era this book would fair quite boring. However, someone wanting an extensive overview, this book would fair quite informative. It's filled will fact after fact.

The book is well separated with such chapters as: Moving, Working, Housing, Consuming, Communicating, Playing, Striving and Living and Dying. Each covering from 1876-1915.

With many books covering this time period in European countries, it's nice to find a well informed book about this time in America, which are basically the years that helped form the way the country is today.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very informative. Lots of nitty gritty detail--well organized presentation of material.

[Lincoln · Rating 3 out of 5]

The perfect three-star book: it was interesting enough that I made it all the way through, but now that I did, I'm not sure it was worth it. That sounds so uncharitable. There was a lot of interesting stuff in here. But it seemed kind of dry to me. Still, there was enough there to keep me going. I can't say it rocked my world, or even revealed to me anything very surprising about the life, customs, and manners of people in America from 1876-1915. But it was quite thorough, and it fleshed out a lot of details I guess I had more or less assumed without realizing it. A highlight to me was the treatment of how the modern "superstore" was introduced in the 19th century -- a far cry from the small mom & pop country stores that very nearly preceded it.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fairly solid overview of a transitional period in American history. As it tries to touch on dozens of aspects of American life over forty years the author really just brushes the surface - it's breadth over depth. Which does mean that discussions of race, gender, and discrimination while mentioned lack nuance. This would be a start, a synopsis, before diving into details.

[Thomas Goodman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really thorough overview of American life between 1876-1915. Useful for any researcher of that era, especially for those who, like me, write stories set between the Civil War and WW1.

[K.C · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very educational. Focuses a lot on production and the switch from craftsmen to an assembly line in some parts, which I'm interested in.

Great read!

[Alexandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is about to be so useful

[Carmen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Extensive but dry, Schlereth's Victorian America provides a solid overview of everyday life...for turn-of-the-century Americans. Despite the title, far more attention is paid to the early 1900s. For those interested in the decades prior, check out The Gilded Age by Joel Shrock.

I found it odd that the book began with a bold statement, that the Victorian era extended well into the 20th century, but then did little to support this claim. I wholeheartedly disagree. America in 1915 was completely different from its former 1880s/90s self--politically, geographically, culturally, and socially. The sweeping changes that Schlereth describes throughout his book undercut his own argument.

[Kay Davis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thomas Schlereth's Victorian America is a comprehensive book on social life and cultural history in America from 1876 to 1915. The book covers topics such as where Americans worked, what they did during their time off, the types of housing they shared, the types of goods they produced and sold, and how they communicated.

The book centers around three cultural events that defined Victorian America: the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, and the 1915 San Francisco Panama-Pacific Exposition. Each event was significant for its presentation of art, architecture, scientific discoveries, and technological inventions that improved the lives of Victorian Americans.

For example, Schlereth reports that "Americans attending expositions at Philadelphia and San Francisco witnessed changes along a diverse cultural spectrum. In 1876 they favored soda water, patent medicines, and took multicourse meals; by 1915 they preferred white flour, cold-cereal breakfasts, and fast-food lunches. In the Centennial's Machinery Hall, individual leather makers crafted horse saddles, completing one every two days; at the Panama-Pacific Exposition, industrial laborers working on an assembly line built a new Ford every hour. Queen Anne houses yielded to California bungalows as the nation's residential ideal. Perhaps most significant of these changes was a transformed middle-class culture, expanded by increasing bureaucratization, fueled by consumer abundance, promulgated by communications technology, and motivated to hold power without property and to maintain hegemony with education and expertise."

The book has many statistics and a list of sources on American cultural history at the turn of the century.

[Rachel Pollock · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this as background period research for a writing project i'm working on. A really good overview of random elements of daily life, that answers questions like "at what point did indoor flush toilets become common" and the like. It shows its age in some out-of-date word usages now considered offensive/impolite ("Orientals" instead of "Asians" when talking about immigrant groups, etc), but the factual info in terms of demographics and social trends is useful and imparted in a readable fashion. It was what i hoped it would be as a reference.

[Shinay · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had been waiting to find a book like this for years. The Virctorian era is a time of invention, social classes are changing, every day life is changing. It breaks down the information into categories: housing, travel, education, amusement, foods. This has information about the people's daily life and all the new wonderous things that make that up. This is not a textbook, it's wonderfully written. So many new inventions to make daily life easier and fun. Loved this. If you want to know how the common working person lived and played and amused themselves this is it. Loved it!

[Jessica Brockmole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating collection of facts about many aspects of everyday life during the period 1876-1915. The author does an excellent job of showing how this was one cohesive period in the United States. It was a period of great change and modernity, yet before those devices such as the telephone and the airplane, which began bringing more uniformity between continents and countries.

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked this one up a few months ago. My colleague at Roanoke College teaches a course in this topic and actually uses this as her text book. The text is very readable and not too "scholarly" in style. The photographs were not reproduced well. Very interesting and an good intro for anyone interested in this time period. Bibliography at the end useful for exploring further.

[Kathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Schlereth begins with Philadelphia's Centennial Exposition of 1876 and finishes with the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in 1915 to describe in a detailed overview the enormous changes of life and culture in America. It's excellent reading, whether the reader finds American history as a profession, an avocation, or just a passing interest.

[Steve Wiggins · Rating 4 out of 5]

A surprisingly engaging history of what the Victorian Era looked like in the United States. This is a book that keeps recurring in my thoughts as i read unrelated material. A good synthesis of information. See more at: Sects and Violence in the Ancient World.

[Hayden · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very good (if broad) overview of the time period. It does give some specific details, though it doesn't go too deep into the topics as a whole, but it's a good starting point for more research and has an extensive bibliography in the back. I checked this one out from the library but will probably eventually buy myself a copy for future use.

[Howard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Same as the other books in the series, lots of great detail, but there's so much literature from this period that we still read that it's much more familiar, and you don't have as much a sense of discovery. Great if you're writing something set in the period, though.

[Donna Jo Atwood · Rating 3 out of 5]

Covers social behaviors of Americans for the last 45 years of the Victorian era. Some things have been around a lot longer than one would think.
Not a book to just sit down and read all the way through, but it is interesting to read.

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book presents quite a bit of information about how Americans lived their daily lives during the Victorian era, but it is easy to read and really held my interest. A great resource for anyone wanting to know more about how people lived in the late 19th century.

[Margaret · Rating 5 out of 5]

about every 10 pages of reading this book I exclaim "holy shit!" It is both wonderfully informative and wonderfully written.

[Rose]

978.8 Sch

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting easily read narrative on various 'themes' i.e. categories of life in the period arranged according to category rather than chronologically.

[Mari · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this one for a class. It was a bit of an info dump, and my head reeled a bit. But overall I liked it. Didn't read the last few chapters, but only due to a packed reading schedule.

[Sandra]

Probably interesting to some, but it was nowhere as interesting as the other books in this series. Too superficial, but long winded.